by the same and only the same people, or their doubles, twice,
thrice, or a little oftener, before the curtain drops and the "army" puts
off its borrowed clothes?

The old Academy building had a dreary look, with its flat face, bare and
uninteresting as our own "University Building" at Cambridge, since the
piazza which relieved its monotony was taken away, and, to balance the
ugliness thus produced, the hideous projection was added to "Harvard
Hall." Two masters sat at the end of the great room,--the principal and
his assistant. Two others presided in separate rooms, one of them the
late Rev. Samuel Horatio Stearns, an excellent and lovable man, who
looked kindly on me, and for whom I always cherished a sincere regard, a
clergyman's son, too, which privilege I did not always find the warrant
of signal virtues; but no matter about that here, and I have promised
myself to be amiable.

On the side of the long room was a large clock-dial, bearing these words:

YOUTH IS THE SEED-TIME OF LIFE.

I had indulged in a prejudice, up to that hour, that youth was the
budding time of life, and this clock-dial, perpetually twitting me with
its seedy moral, always had a forbidding look to my vernal apprehension.

I was put into a seat with an older and much bigger boy, or youth, with a
fuliginous complexion, a dilating and whitening nostril, and a singularly
malignant scowl. Many years afterwards he committed an act of murderous
violence, and ended by going to finish his days in a madhouse. His
delight was to kick my shins with all his might, under the desk, not at
all as an act of hostility, but as a gratifying and harmless pastime.
Finding this, so far as I was concerned, equally devoid of pleasure and
profit, I managed to get a seat by another boy, the son of a very
distinguished divine. He was bright enough, and more select in his
choice of recreations, at least during school hours, than my late
homicidal neighbor. But the principal called me up presently, and
cautioned me against him as a dangerous companion. Could it be so? If
the son of that boy's father could not be trusted, what boy in
Christendom could? It seemed like the story of the youth doomed to be
slain by a lion before reaching a certain age, and whose fate found him
out in the heart of the tower where his father had shut him up for
safety. Here was I, in the very dove's nest of Puritan faith, and out of
one of its eggs a serpent had been hatched